


Grounded

by ziskandra



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 02:52:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10480497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziskandra/pseuds/ziskandra
Summary: Calvin remembers the first time he held Liam in his arms. Big baby, nine pounds. His son is an ugly, wrinkly thing and yet also the most beautiful sight in the world. He smooths down the infant’s hair, kisses the soft spot on his head and whispers, “You’re gonna do great things."During the Reaper War, Calvin Kosta reflects on his relationship with his son.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've done my best to keep this as canon-compliant as possible but please, please let me know if you notice any glaring errors!

 

It is two months after their son leaves for Andromeda that the Reapers descend on Earth. Blame is cast, fingers pointed, neither lasting long. Silence soon descends on the megalopolises and London is disconnected from the world.

***

 _“Do you really have to go?” Joelle asks, hugging her son, her child, her_ only child _so fiercely it’s as though she believes the embrace will change his mind. “It’s so hard, just—knowing we’ll never see you again.”_  
  
_They’ve had this conversation a million times, but it still doesn’t mean Liam doesn’t cry. He knows what this means to his parents – especially to Mum – but he has to do this. The opportunity to make  a difference, a real difference, is too much to pass up. “They need me,” he says, finally pulling back, but it doesn’t stop Joelle from making her last stand._  
  
“I _need you_ ,” _she insists, and Calvin sees his opportunity to intervene. Places a hand on his wife’s shoulder, claps a hand to Liam’s._  
  
_“She’ll be safe with me,” he promises, flint-brown eyes focused on his son’s face. “You know what you have to do, son. There’s a whole new galaxy out there.”_

  
_***_

It’s a pity that it’s not a promise Calvin gets to keep. Oh, they do alright for a pair of civilians, at least in the beginning. Comms are down and looting has already begun when some of the guys from Liam’s old unit in HUSTL swing by (we remembered the address, they said, from his farewell, as though their son had gone backpacking in South America rather than to the edge of the galaxy and beyond). The relief is palpable in their eyes when they see the Kostas safe and sound, and one of them – Hammond, his name is, short cropped blonde hair, green eyes – grumbles something along the lines of ‘Liam would never forgive us if anything happened to you’.  Calvin decides he likes the guy.  
  
When they ask how he and Joelle have survived this long, that’s when Joelle pulls out her gun.

***

_Joelle rarely talks about her Alliance days. What Calvin knows about them are scraps he’s heard from other people. Oh, he knows the official story; honorable discharge, the fucked-up arm, the funding for her law school fees. Connecting the dots leads him to the First Contact War, a mistrust of aliens, especially the ‘birds’, although she’s careful who she uses the slur around. There had been a time, when Liam had been about to finish school, that Calvin had raised his concerns about Liam’s future to his wife. Their son is brilliant, but lacks direction. Calvin fears that he, himself, has always been the opposite. With lawyers as parents, law seems the obvious choice. But even Joelle can’t see that happening. She says, “If there’s one thing for certain,” Joelle says, gaze hard as steel, “he’ll join the Alliance over my dead body.”_

_Later that year, Liam commences his Bachelor of Engineering._  
  
_He doesn’t last long._

***

They have to keep moving. It’s the only way to survive. Some cities are hanging on at the fringes, pretend parlays with their new supreme robot overlords. Joelle spits in disgust whenever she hears the news. “Don’t they see what’s happening?” she asks. “Same shit as usual, these ‘Reapers’ just have the decency to be _upfront_ about it.” While even Calvin admits that it’s too good to be true, he still wishes, in his hearts of hearts, that it is. Nonetheless, London is too large a target, and nearby, whole _cities_ are getting wiped off the map, so they meet up with another group of refugees to make their way into the countryside, to rebuild their forces as they think of how to best tackle their formidable opponent.

Joelle’s not happy, but Calvin feels worse. What use is a degree in galactic business law at the end of the world?

***

_“Jamieson.” They are at the bar on the Citadel where they first met. An anniversary dinner, after a fashion. Truthfully, Joelle is here for work. Calvin has long left this life behind. It’s the first time he’s been spaceside in almost a decade. It’s also been about that long since he’s heard anyone call Joelle ‘Jamieson’. She is a Kosta now. Who wonders who this man is, who dares interrupt their evening, and furthermore, he wonders why Joelle is letting him._

_His question is answered when her posture stiffens, an expression on her face as though she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “Commander?” she asks, her voice full of wonder Calvin hasn’t heard in years._  
  
_The man shakes his head. “Just ‘Ryder’ now,” he says, before pointing at the barstool to Joelle’s left. “Mind if I sit?” Joelle looks at Calvin and Calvin shakes his head._  
  
_“No, not at all,” he answers, although privately, he does mind. Just a little bit. Mostly he’s just curious. Joelle never talks about her past. “I’ll just get us another drink. You want one?” he asks the stranger, and the man waves a hand._  
  
_The last thing he hears before he heads over to the bar is, “How old, now?”_  
  
_“Nine.”_  
  
_When Calvin returns with their beers, Ryder is already leaving. “Keep in touch,” he says to Joelle with a tap of her omnitool._  
  
_She barely looks at him as she responds. “Okay.”_

***

Joelle has always had a temper but the world being laid to the waste has turned her demeanour into something else entirely. It’s like she’s always believed this day will come. He can’t still believe she’d hidden a firearm from him all these years. When he’d joked that he’d thought her military days were over, she’d scowled and said, “I did what I had to do for our son.” For someone who specialises in alien rights in galactic law (back in the day, she’d reminded him, they just called it _human rights_ ), she sees such little beauty in the universe.  
  
For once, Calvin can’t help but dig his feet in. “Which was?” he asks.  
  
“Keep him grounded,” she answers, “because heaven knows you couldn’t.”

It is in these moments that Calvin misses Liam most; the moment where he realises their shared love for their son was the only thing keeping them all together.

***

 _“Liam,” Calvin scolds as he picks his son up from school, “you can’t keep doing this.”_  
  
_His son’s lip is swollen from his schoolyard brawl and Calvin can tell that the tension still hasn’t disappitated from Liam’s demeanour. “Can’t keep doing what?” he challenges, scuffing his trainers against the footpath. “Somebody was getting hurt.”_  
  
_“I know you want to help,” Calvin concedes, “but this doesn’t. Just look at you. Now you’re the one who’s injured.”_  
  
_Liam wipes at his mouth with a sleeve, and glares moodily into the distance. “Better me than them.” He shrugs. “How do you just stand by and do nothing?”_  
  
_And maybe his son means it as a general enquiry, but there’s something in the way he’s chosen to say it that makes Calvin feel like it was directed at him. He tries not to take it personally, but it still hurts. He slows to a still and lays a hand on his son’s shoulder, tries to remember what his own Pa had said to him. “You should want to make the world a better place. Not add to its suffering. We’ll figure something out that we’re both happy with, okay?”_  
  
_Liam doesn’t seem convinced, but at the very least, he stops arguing. Calvin thanks God that he is only half as stubborn as his mother._  
  
_Later that year, Liam wins the most improved player award for the under-twelve’s football team._

***

There are whispers among the assorted resistance that humanity’s first Spectre, Commander Shepard, will surely save them all. She was the one who single-handedly put down the geth uprising on the Citadel, and as it turns out? That incident might have been the fault of a Reaper, too. Joelle doesn’t believe the stories; these days, her finger is never far from the trigger of her gun. “She’s a terrorist,” she tells her husband flatly whenever he does his best to reassure her, because he’s just the kind of guy who’ll never stop believing that everything will be okay. “Three hundred thousand lives, never to be answered for.” _Batarian lives_ , Calvin thinks, before he can stop himself, because in another world, another life, that would have been Joelle’s line.  
  
Calvin doesn’t bother to clarify that humanity have since lost a lot more. It’s easier to hate the monstrous alien robots than it is to believe that other people are flawed.

***

_There was a point in time where Liam’s favourite movie was War of the Worlds (2005). An old movie, dating back to the pre-holovid days. He’d always insisted on watching in its original format; no remaster could satisfy Liam. It’s the only sci-fi movie on his list of favourites that Joelle doesn’t complain about him watching. Probably, he suspects, because the aliens are the enemy. It all seems a bit fantastical, anyway. All the aliens Calvin’s ever met have been people. Good ones, bad ones. People. He does his best to remind Liam of this, but his son, for some reason, seems mostly invested in the compellingly average action sequences._

_***_

They don’t expect a visit from Admiral David Anderson, the defacto leader of the London resistance, until they realise they’ve lost track of where they’re going and have started to head back from where they’ve came. Calvin looks over at Joelle, wondering if he can silently warn her not to badmouth Commander Shepard while in the Admiral’s presence. Instead, when their eyes meet, he realises that they know each other. “Hell, Jamieson, that you?” and she answers _Admiral_ without bothering to correct him.

“How many of there are you?” he asks. There are thirteen of them: him and Joelle and the two HUSTL guys and the stragglers they’ve picked up along the way. He doesn’t miss the way the Admiral’s eyebrows knit, as though surprised they’ve made it this far.  
  
Honestly, Calvin’s surprised, too. Anderson distributes what limited supplies before regretfully continuing on his journey, but he can tell something’s bothering Joelle. When the Reapers first came she had been full of fire and fight and fury and now he can’t help but think she’s starting to feel defeated. She worries at her lip and when Calvin asks her what’s wrong, words spill and with them tears. “Oh, god, Calvin, I almost said Liam’s name. Like he was here with us.” She hangs her head. “You…probably figured it out. It was me who passed his info onto the Initiative. Why he was recruited for the team. I wanted him to be happy. But I failed him, didn’t I? I failed us.”  
  
Calvin could laugh. Calvin could weep. Instead, he draws his wife into his arms for the first time in years and says, “No, darling, _you saved him_.”

They embrace and she smiles. “I wanted to save the whole world, once.” Calvin simply nods because he knows that woman has always been there, flitting under his wife’s surface of fear and anger. Realises that it’s not hatred that Joelle feels for Shepard, but _envy_.

“So did I,” he answers, but Joelle shakes her head.

“You still do,” she insists, but he’s not sure if he agrees.  

 (Later that night, as he struggles to sleep, Joelle turns to him and says, “Have you ever seen what a turian’s talons can do to human skin if left untreated?”  
  
He realises the answer is _yes.)_

***

 _He’d never truly given much thought to what it would mean to be a father until it had already been too late. Calvin had always been the kind of man to get lost in the flow of fate. If he’d stopped to think about it, he might’ve found it wasn’t as bad as he anticipated. There is an unusual, unquantifiable sense of joy in watching his son wobble on his uneven legs, plopping down on his bum after struggling to take a step. It never stops him from getting back up and trying again. Children are so resilient, he thinks, and he wonders how long it lasts._  
  
_Wonders, sometimes, when he had given up._

***

They make their last stand in a converted farmhouse in the outskirts of Sheffield. There are just six of them left when the undead start battering down the doors. They are out of supplies, resources, energy, _time._ It is in this moment that Calvin accepts at long last that this might be where he dies. Joelle’s modified rifle never seems to stop firing. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” she swears which each round. Even with her off-hand, she’s an excellent shot. They all hit their mark but it’s not enough. It’s never enough.  
  
The horde of husks never stops. Inhuman arms ( _just human enough_ ) batter all around them. He can feel blood splatter on his hands, his face. Calvin whispers a prayer underneath his breath and closes his eyes. The last thought he has is of his son.

He hopes he makes it.

***

_Calvin remembers the first time he held Liam in his arms. Big baby, nine pounds. His son is an ugly, wrinkly thing and yet also the most beautiful sight in the world. He smooths down the infant’s hair, kisses the soft spot on his head and whispers, “You’re gonna do great things."_

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you like my writing and want to drop me a line, I'm on Tumblr @commspecialist!


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